Ottawa Citizen's 2011 federal election notebook.

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Linda Keen to endorse Green leader Elizabeth May

The Green Party raised eyebrows Thursday with a press release announcing an event with leader Elizabeth May and former nuclear safety regulator Linda Keen.

Keen, of course, was infamously turfed by the Harper government as head of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission over her cautious approach to rebooting the reactor that makes medical isotopes. She is often cited as one of the public servants sacked for crossing Harper.

The announcement of the even with May on Friday set off speculation that Keen would be running as a Green candidate. Wouldn’t that be a coup for a party that is diametrically opposed to nuclear power?

But Keen tells Talking Points she will merely endorse May as a candidate in Saanich-Gulf Islands.

“I think she has a heck of a good chance of making a difference,” said Keen, who used to live on Vancouver Island. “It would be great if she got in.”

May’s opponent in the riding? Come on down, Gary Lunn, who served as Natural Resources minister and personally poured the Kool-aid for Keen. Best served cold, indeed.

Keen’s support for the Greens does not appear to be universal. She lives in Ottawa Centre, currently held by New Democrat Paul Dewar, but hasn’t decided whom she’ll back locally.

You neglected to mention the reason Keen ordered Chalk River shut down: it had failed to comply for two years with an order that they have a backup power source for their emergency cooling system.

Does that sound at all familiar? It was the elimination by tsunami of the backup power source that directly caused Fukushima to melt down!

“Cautious approach” sounds like driving 50 in an 80 speed limit. Keen herself described her approach as taking the odds of a disaster from 1,000:1 to 1,000,000:1. Given the gravity of a nuclear disaster, I’ll take the million-to-one odds, thank you!

Thank goodness we didn’t have “Fukushima on the Ottawa River” to deal with — Ottawa is too hot to handle as is, even without iodine-131 and caesium-137 in their drinking water.